To the reader: The article below concerns an individual named Richard Hoagland. Many readers may be familiar with him since he is a frequent guest on the popular late-night radio show Coast to Coast and also the author of a book entitled The Monuments of Mars. Other readers can find out something about Mr. Hoagland by perusing his extensive website
The Enterprise Mission. As for me, the author of this page, the reader can look
here-- Ralph Greenberg's Home Page.

My article contains serious criticism of Mr. Hoagland. It is my opinion that he misleads people terribly and that he does so knowingly. The issue of Europa which is discussed below is just one example. My criticism has received considerable attention on the internet. Judging from the responses that I've received, many people agree with my criticism. Some don't.

I originally wrote a much shorter version of this article when I created my webpage late in 1998, intending it as background for a fax that I had sent to Art Bell and an explanation of the basis of my criticism. I have made various revisions and additions from time to time over the intervening years.
As a result, my article is now extremely long. It will certainly try the endurance of its readers. There is a lot of information that I've gathered together here which is not available anywhere else on the internet, and I am reluctant to leave any of it out.

The page referred to in the title below is: EUROPA. The main article
included on that page is An Ocean on Europa?,
a historical account of the ideas that Europa might have an ocean of
liquid water and that life might be found there.
I have left the title -"The Origin of this Page" - unchanged, although it is no longer
completely appropiate. I have also constructed a page of links to other related articles on the internet and on my website and to a few letters that I have written to Hoagland, as well as an e-mail exchange with Michael Bara, Hoagland's longtime assistant.

THE ORIGIN OF THIS
PAGE - ANOTHER HISTORY

(Revised October 9th, 2002)

It might seem rather strange
to find an article about one of Jupiter's moons on a mathematician's homepage.
In the Spring of 1997 I spent dozens of hours in the Astronomy-Physics
Library on campus and in the Seattle Public Library digging up all the
information that I could find about the origin of the ideas that Europa
might have an ocean and that life might evolve in such an environment.
I started creating this homepage in the Fall of 1998 and decided then to
turn the information that I had gathered into something that I hoped would
be useful. My own research interests as a mathematician have no relationship
with Europa, or even with astronomy. It would seem much more natural for
an astronomer or planetary geologist to write such an article, and the
result would have undoubtedly been better, but it seemed unlikely that
that would happen. There have been numerous articles about Europa in recent
years explaining why scientists believe there might be an ocean on that
far-away body and discussing the possibility of Europan life, but
those articles say very little about the history of those ideas. Just once
did I find it mentioned that the idea of an ocean on Europa was first proposed
by John S. Lewis. Occasionally, I found statements that the debate about
the existence of such an ocean goes back decades. But no details!
I had the impression that even scientists working in the field know little
about the history. For this reason alone, writing the article seemed
like a worthwhile effort on my part.

The reason that I
first started digging into that history is a story in itself, and a rather
unpleasant one. It was really a kind of protest against what I perceived
as extreme hypocrisy on the part of certain individuals. That hypocrisy
continues and so I find it necessary to give a documented account of the
incidents that originally spurred my efforts and that have led me to persist
in my protest. Here is one example of my persistence.

It was during
the summer of 1996 that I first listened to the late-night radio show Coast-To-Coast,
hosted by Art Bell. I was intrigued by the show, but also quite bothered
by certain aspects of it. I saw a great potential in a show like Coast-To-Coast
and will say more about that on another page: Reflections on the Art Bell Show. I had never heard of Richard
Hoagland before listening to that show. The first topic that I heard him
discuss was his theory that ancient, artificial structures exist on the
moon. The first time that I heard Hoagland discuss Europa was one night
in July, 1996. As I recall, I had only recently learned of the theory
that Europa might have a liquid water ocean and that life might exist in
such an ocean. The Galileo spacecraft had just recently started to send
back photographs from the Jupiter system, which generated a lot of excitement
and discussion in the media.

That night, Richard
Hoagland mentioned his article The Europa Enigma which he wrote
for the January, 1980 issue of Star & Sky Magazine. Hoagland
also made an accusation that a scientist named Steven Squyres and NASA
were trying to steal credit from him. Hoagland's assertion was that
NASA might have discovered that life really does exist on Europa and wanted
to make sure that they would get credit rather than him. This assertion
was based on a news report
about a lecture that Squyres had given in England. At the same time,
Hoagland posted a
press
release on the Enterprise Mission website making the same accusation
against Squyres. It was also the subject of an interview
by Michael Corbin. My reaction was that it was extremely irresponsible
for someone to make such an accusation on a nation-wide radio show based
merely on a news report. As I learned only recently, neither Hoagland
nor any of his associates even bothered to contact the author of the news
report to determine whether the accusation was accurate. They also did not bother to contact Squyres himself. In fact, the accusation turned
out to be entirely unjustified. I also did not realize the hypocrisy implicit in Hoagland's accusation against Squyres at that time. That only became apparent to me some six or seven months later.

Europa was in the news rather frequently during 1996-97. During Hoagland's
rather frequent guest appearances, Art Bell would often mention some recent
news item about Europa and either he or Hoagland would bring up the subject
of Hoagland's 1980 article, always giving the impression that it was he
who first proposed both the idea that Europa might have an ocean of liquid
water and the idea that life might develop in that environment. Art
Bell would then usually add some sarcastic comments about the scientific
community not giving Hoagland his due credit. I also recall hearing callers
to Art Bell's Show mention that Hoagland had been far in advance of the scientific community in proposing the possibility of an ocean on Europa and therefore his current ideas should be taken seriously. That happened just two or
three times, but I gradually became aware during the following two years that it was rather widely believed that Hoagland really was the first to propose
that important idea.

Early in 1997,
I came across an article in Science News which mentioned that the
idea of an ocean under the ice of Europa was first proposed by John S.
Lewis in 1971. This was inconsistent with the impression that Richard
Hoagland's statements gave. It was my first clue that the version of history
we were hearing on the Art Bell Show might not be right. But it was
not just Hoagland who contributed to this. In April of 1997,
an article by Terence Dickinson appeared in the Toronto Star. After
it appeared, Hoagland was a guest on Coast-To-Coast and Art Bell read Dickinson's
article in its entirety just as he was introducing Hoagland that night.
Here is the article (Original
EuropaThesis Just Too Alien):

The Sunday Star - TorontoApril 13, 1997Context Section, page F8

At a news conference
Wednesday, NASA scientists presented the latest images from the Galileo
spacecraft that is in orbit around Jupiter. The photos, showing yawning
cracks and blocks of ice the size of house on Jupiter's moon, Europa, offer
the most compelling evidence yet that there is an ocean of water, possibly
harboring life, beneath the frozen surface of this world, which is roughly
the size of the Earth's moon.

It's a strange
story, but 18 years ago I was there when the first person on Earth realised
what Europa is really like. It was July 10, 1979, just hours after the
American space probe Voyager 2 had cruised near Jupiter and its family
of 16 moons. I was standing beside science writer Richard Hoagland at Voyager
mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California,
gazing intently at one of the television monitors displaying Voyager
2 images of Europa.

Nobody had ever
seen anything like Europa before, Instead of the usual cratered landscape,
Europa's surface is smooth, like a billiard ball. The highest resolution
images did reveal some detail - low ridges and linear features covering
the surface in apparently random patterns - but at first glance it was
baffling. Then Hoagland said, almost in a whisper, "Its a crust of ice.
And there's water below it."

He stood there,
thinking about what he had just said, then asked me if I would be interested
in an article on the idea. At the time, I was editor of 'Star & Sky',
an American popular-level astronomy magazine that has long since ceased
publication. I readily accepted.

Later, as he was
working on the article, Hoagland phoned me from his home in
Oakland, California,
to tell me, with growing enthusiasm, about how all the pieces fit. Europa,
he said, had a rocky core that was heated by gravitational tugging from
Jupiter's three other large moons. As those moons swung close to Europa,
then retreated, the varying gravitational forces squeezed and relaxed the
rocky core, heating it in the process.

This, he said,
would melt the icy crust that apparently cloaks the Jovian moon. Only the
outer surface, which is exposed to the intense cold of space, remains frozen.
The ocean below could easily contain more water than is in Earth's oceans.
And like in Earth's oceans, he went on, life could exist near volcanic
vents.

Hoagland's ideas
about Europa appeared as the cover story in the January, 1980, issue of
'Star & Sky'. Given the potential importance of the concept, I issued
a news release to coincide with the issue's publication. It was picked
up by all the major news services and the story ran in hundreds of newspapers.
It appeared in 'The Toronto Star' on December. 27, 1979, under the headline
'By Jupiter! Maybe there is alien life in space'.

Then, instead
of Hoagland's ideas appearing in textbooks, NASA brochures and other publications
about the solar system, they were ignored. Today, Hoagland almost never
receives credit for his Europa work. Why? He was never part of establishment
science and he has moved much further from it than he was back in 1979.
Today, he champions the idea that aliens built a rock formation called
the 'face' on Mars. Few scientists want to be even remotely associated
with a "kook", no matter how brilliant his ideas.

The idea that gravitational tugging might produce enough
heat to maintain a liquid water ocean on Europa was a marvelous insight.
Dickinson seems to have the impression that that was Hoagland's idea.
Anyone reading Dickinson's account would have exactly the same impression.
But it
was not Hoagland's idea at all. It comes straight out of the paper
Is There Liquid Water on Europa? by Cassen, Peale, and Reynolds
written in June, 1979. When Art Bell read Dickinson's article on
the show, Hoagland chose to say absolutely nothing to correct
the erroneous impression which that article conveyed.

It should be pointed out that Dickinson states the theory of Cassen, Peale,
and Reynolds incorrectly. It is much more accurately stated in
The Europa Enigma, and so perhaps Hoagland learned the theory better
when he was writing it. The gravitational forces of the other moons
preserve the eccentricity of
Europa's orbit. That eccentricity causes the variation in Jupiter's
gravitational force on Europa, resulting in a significant tidal effect on
the crust, which, if it is thin, would be somewhat flexible. The flexing of
the icy crust would then create frictional heat which, according to the
calculations of Cassen, Peale, and Reynolds, may be sufficient to
maintain a liquid ocean underneath the crust.

Dickinson's quote from Hoagland - "It's a crust of ice. And there is water below it." - is quite puzzling. He precedes this quote by writing that Hoagland was the first to realize what Europa was really like. Did this thought really just occur to Hoagland at that instant, independently of any discussions of the same idea by others? Or was Hoagland just telling Dickinson about the current speculations among scientists at JPL at the time, and his meaning was simply misunderstood? Or did Hoagland's pretense over this issue actually begin at that instant? Or is Dickinson distinguishing between scientific theorizing about the possibility of an ocean under the crust of ice or actually knowing. It is hard to reconcile this incident reported by Dickinson with Squyres' account of events around JPL which I will mention below.

Just to be
completely clear about this, I do not believe that Dickinson's intention
was to mislead anyone. It seems from reading his article that he truly
believed that the ideas he refers to as Hoagland's are really due to
Hoagland. In my opinion, this is the most disturbing aspect of Dickinson's
article. If my interpretation is correct, then even the editor of
Star & Sky
was one of the many people who thought that Hoagland was the originator of
the idea that an ocean might exist on Europa, and even the more specific idea
that the same kind of tidal heating that causes volcanoes on Io might
maintain an ocean on another moon of Jupiter. I will return to this
point later.

New York, April 14 -- A set of precise, published,
scientific predictions made by Richard C. Hoagland, almost 20 years ago
in Star & Sky Magazine, still electronically available on the World-Wide-Web,
have now been strikingly confirmed by NASA's latest results from the on-going
Galileo Mission to the planet Jupiter. Hoagland is founder and current
Principal Investigator of The Enterprise Mission, an independent space
research and policy group pursuing studies on the scientific and social
implications of the successful confirmation of extraterrestrial life. Incoming
images and data, gathered during a recent fly-by of the Jovian moon "Europa,"
appear this week to have confirmed not only Hoagland's 17-year-old detailed
model of a liquid "satellite-wide ocean under the icefields of Europa"
-- but also "now strongly indicate the presence of organic compounds lying
on Europa's surface," in precise accordance with Hoagland's earlier
discussions re the possibility of "the origin and subsequent evolution of life in this
satellite-wide ocean." The latest Galileo findings, now strongly supporting
Hoagland's pioneering analysis of previous NASA Voyager mission data from
Jupiter in 1979, were released at an official NASA press briefing, held
in Pasadena, CA., April 9.

The author of the above news release is not given, but
if Hoagland did not write it himself, he must have approved it. He
may have truly believed that he was the first person to discuss the possibility
that life might develop in an ocean on Europa. However, concerning
the existence of such an ocean, Hoagland was familiar with the work of
Cassen, Peale, and Reynolds, which they published in 1979 in their article
Is there liquid water on Europa? He discusses the ideas of those
scientists in his 1980 article. The model of a liquid, satellite-wide
ocean under the icefields of Europa actually goes back much further, having
been proposed by John S. Lewis in 1971, although Hoagland may have been
unfamiliar with his work. In The Europa Enigma, Hoagland adds
nothing to that model beyond the picture suggested by Cassen, Peale, and
Reynolds. Referring to such a model as "Hoagland's" is a deception.

In April and May, 1997,
I devoted quite a bit of time to tracking down some of the literature about
the possibility of an ocean on Europa, and also about the possibility
that life might develop in such an ocean, and wrote a six-page letter on this
topic. Most of that letter was a summary of the history of those
ideas, but it also criticized Hoagland because, even though he was not
the originator of the idea that Europa might have an ocean of liquid water,
he nevertheless was willing to mislead people about that. My criticism was directed at Hoagland's behavior in recent years, and not at what he wrote in The Europa Enigma. Concerning that article, my letter stated that "an attentive reader will realize that the idea that a liquid water ocean under ice might exist on Europa was not a new one." I recall rereading those pages in Hoagland's article where he discusses that idea numerous
times, trying to guess how most readers would interpret what is written there.
I now believe that I misjudged that, as I will discuss below.

I had some positive things to say about Hoagland's article in my letter.
I wrote:

"It is impressively
well-researched and very imaginative. It is exciting to read. Its enthusiasm is contagious. It is very unfortunate that Mr. Hoagland will probably never again make such a valuable contribution to the popularization of scientific ideas."

I suppressed any mention of the weaknesses that I perceived in the article. I
felt that writing The Europa Enigma was one positive thing that Hoagland had done in his life. Even though I have very little respect for him as he is today, based on many specific things that he has done, I did not feel any need to criticize something positive that he had done 17 years earlier.

At the end of my letter, I mentioned my
attempt to challenge Hoagland on one of the basic premises of his professed beliefs about Mars - the so-called "Geometry of Cydonia" that Hoagland has written and lectured about, and frequently referred to on the Art Bell Show.

As I was working on that letter, I contacted Art Bell by e-mail, telling him
briefly about what I had uncovered concerning the history of ideas about Europa, and that I
would soon send him a letter about it. I asked him if he would be willing to
do something to correct
the distorted version of the history of those important ideas that had
been presented on his show, and expressing my unhappiness over the situation.
His response (terse as usual):

We shall see.
Life is full of unhappy moments.

Art

That letter was actually addressed to a journalist named Jay Ingram who had also, by coincidence, written an article about Hoagland and Europa for the Toronto Star: Europa and the Hoagland Eccentricity. In addition to sending that letter to Ingram (in early June, 1997), I sent copies to Terence Dickinson, Arthur C. Clarke (who sent me a very cordial response), various scientists and journalists, and, of course, Richard Hoagland and Art Bell.

My letter seemed to have no effect. For the next six months,
I made something of a pest of myself over this issue with the goal of just
trying to get Art Bell or Richard Hoagland to make the necessary correction.
Finally, on the afternoon of December 4th, 1997, knowing that Hoagland
would be a guest that evening, I sent a fax to Art Bell summarizing the
history of those ideas about Europa. I have no doubt that Art Bell
sent a copy of my fax to Richard Hoagland before the show. And instead
of some tactful clarification of the issue, Hoagland chose to make another
quite misleading statement, with Art Bell providing him the opportunity:

ART BELL: Richard, you are I believe originally
noted for your investigation into the monuments of Mars, and then, following
that, artifacts that you have shown on the moon.

RICHARD HOAGLAND: Well actually, even
before that, back in the 1980's I was looking very hard at a little moon
of Jupiter called Europa, and when I was covering the Voyager story
out at JPL in the Summer of 1980, actually the Spring of 1979 and the Winter
of 1980, we flew this extraordinary spacecraft, NASA did, by Jupiter for
the first time and encountered the four moons, you know, Io, Ganymede,
Europa, Callisto, and Jupiter itself, and it was as part of that observation
that I began work on essentially what turned out to be the first scientific
paper, which ultimately appeared in Star and Sky Magazine in the beginning
of 1980, which was a prognostication, pulling all the data together, that
there might be a global ocean under the ice cover that Voyager had revealed
and that in that global ocean there actually might be some extant living
life forms. Well, they used to say that if you wait long enough sometimes
things come around, well this last year, with the Galileo Mission, in orbit
around Jupiter, some 17 years after that set of predictions, it turns out
that probably we are correct.

I prepared other
faxes and sent them to Art Bell. Here is one that I sent on December 15th,
1997: Fax to Art Bell. It is essentially
a brief summary of what is contained in my letter written six months earlier.
After that, I continued to remind Bell of this still unresolved issue by
e-mail and by fax. The only thing that happened was that Art Bell and Richard
Hoagland never again mentioned his claim that he was the originator of
those ideas about Europa. At least, I never heard it mentioned myself. Perhaps my messages and faxes were responsible
for that.

Shortly after the first NASA unmanned Voyager mission
to Jupiter, in March, 1979, Richard C. Hoagland published in Star &
Sky magazine a radical new theory--regarding implications stemming from
Voyager's historic fly-by and data return from one of the "Galilean moons":

Europa.

Hoagland proposed that a planet-wide ocean still exists
under the tens-of-miles-thick sulphur-tinged ice now completely covering
Europa. Further, that in that extremely ancient ocean -- the only
other planetary "near-by" liquid water that may have persisted from the
beginnings of the solar system (other than on Earth)--

Life may have once originated ... an alien type of
life that -- because of the present uniqueness of Europa in the entire
solar system --currently might still exist ...

At the time, Hoagland's theory encountered overwhelming
opposition from almost everyone at NASA, official and/or scientist ...
except for two significant exceptions: inventor of the communications
satellite, famed science and science fiction writer ("2001: A Space Odyssey"),
Arthur C. Clark; and, Dr. Robert Jastrow -- one of the founders of NASA,
and former Director of its Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Based on
Hoagland's startling theory, Clark two years later would create a sequel
to his most famous work ("2010: Odyssey Two" -- after long claiming that
such a follow-on was "impossible"). This would then be followed by a movie
sequel (co-written and directed by Peter Hyams) of the same name.

In the acknowledgments to "2010," Clark would write:

"The fascinating idea that there might be life on Europa,
beneath ice-covered oceans kept liquid by the same Jovian tidal forces
that heat Io, was first proposed by Richard C. Hoagland in the magazine
Star & Sky ( The Europa Enigma,' January, 1980). This quite brilliant
concept has been taken seriously by a number of astronomers (notably NASA's
Institute of Space Studies, Dr. Robert Jastrow), and may provide one of
the best motives for the projected GALILEO Mission..."

The reader should look at that page carefully, and in its entirety. It is
likely that most visitors to that page would know nothing about the history
of ideas concerning Europa. I believe that any such visitor would come away
with the false impression that the idea of a liquid water ocean on Europa
originated with Hoagland. The page seems deliberately designed to give that
impression. However, I suspect that whoever created that page was not
trying to be deceptive, but simply believed that Hoagland really was the first to propose that idea.

On the page, alongside the above quote summarizing Hoagland's "radical new
theory", one finds an illustration of a cut-away view of Europa showing such
an ocean under a crust of ice. (It is inaccurately labeled and is actually
rather amusing.)

The page starts out with a quote from NASA's Administrator Dan Goldin (from
1995).

"If we could discover an ocean on Europa...unbelievable!"

Later we read more about the current opinions of NASA scientists:

"And, in an astonishing reversal of their previous opinions, NASA's
entire Galileo team (if not all of NASA itself) is now on record as "eagerly
awaiting confirmation of the existence of Europa's planet-wide, ice-covered
ocean via GALILEO information" -- if not what may lurk below ..."

The "astonishing reversal of their previous opinions" is clearly a
reference to the "overwhelming opposition from almost everyone at NASA,
official and/or scientist" encountered by "Hoagland's theory." Again, the
implication seems quite clear: It was Hoagland , and not NASA scientists, who
proposed the possibility of an ocean on Europa back in 1979.

In fact, two of the three authors of "Is there liquid water on Europa?" were
NASA scientists working at the Ames Research Center - P.Cassen and R.Reynolds.
At least concerning the possibility of an ocean on Europa, this "overwhelming
opposition" would seem to be a fiction. One can document that this was
considered a real possibility by NASA scientists at the time of the Voyager
missions in 1979, offering it as one possible way to explain the nature of
Europa`s surface. Some of this documentation will be discussed below in connection with the account given by Squyres concerning the opinions of NASA
scientists at the time.

Arthur C. Clarke's acknowledgement of Hoagland is quite generous, but is
unfortunately written in a rather ambiguous way. Does Clarke mean that the
idea of "ice-covered oceans kept liquid by the same Jovian tidal forces that
heat Io" was actually Hoagland's? Appearing on that page introducing Hoagland's article, together with the other misleading statements there, readers would
be very likely to give it that meaning. I suspect that Clarke really did have that
meaning in mind, and did think that it was accurate. Otherwise, he would
have surely realized the potential for confusion and expressed himself
more clearly. It was because of that acknowledgement that I decided to send a
copy of my letter of June, 1997 to Clarke. In his response, he made several comments about Hoagland, both positive and negative. Concerning The Europa Enigma, he wrote:

"I am also grateful to him
for the excellent 1980 article he wrote--my first introduction to the idea. Since then
I have become aware of the fact that many others had thought of it first, as you point out."

In a message to Michael Bara (dated May 1st, 2001), I make one more attempt to remedy the situation, asking for a drastic revision
of the page introducing The Europa Enigma.

Many people have believed in the myth that Hoagland was the first to propose the existence of an ocean on Europa. That myth seems to have originated many years ago. Hoagland
has gained considerable undeserved credibility as a result. As I mentioned before, I recall hearing
callers to Art Bell's Show state that Hoagland had been far in advance
of the scientific community in proposing the possibility of an ocean on
Europa and therefore his current ideas should be taken seriously. I recall
seeing similar statements on the message boards on Bell's and Hoagland's
websites (and also more recently in a few of the readers' reviews of The
Monuments of Mars at amazon.com).

Even an ABC News report By Jove, Water on Europa? (January, 1998) by Kenneth Chang clearly attributes the idea to Hoagland. After writing that
Hoagland was the first to suggest the "idea of oceans on Europa and life within them," he states: "Meanwhile, the ocean half of Hoagland's Europa hypothesis has entered the mainstream of scientific debate."
Here is the article scrolled from the original, now defunct, webpage: By Jove, Water on Europa?. I wrote to Chang in January, 2001 to ask him why he believed that Hoagland deserved such credit. He told me that he hadn't done any research into the history himself, but simply repeated what he was told by many people, even some scientists.

(NOTE: The original link was:
http://archive.abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/europa0121/index.html. This link was good at least until 2003, when it strangely appeared on the Enterprise Mission website under the headline: ABC News Cites Hoagland for Europa Discoveries ... Again.
See the April 15th listing in the archives for that year on the Enterprise mission website. There was no mention of the fact that the article was five years old at that time. )

Late in 1998, I came across Charles Tritt's website Possibility of Life on Europa and again
found the statement that Hoagland was the first to suggest that Europa might have an ocean. It was accompanied by a link to the page mentioned above introducing Hoagland's 1980 article, but giving a date of March, 1979, as the quote given above seems to indicate. After I contacted him, Tritt changed the statement and now writes that John S. Lewis may have been the first to suggest the possibility of such an ocean, giving a reference to his 1971 paper in Icarus.

Sometime in 1999, I came across Scott De Laruelle's website Life on Europa? which contains the following statement in the section called "EUROPA: Key Dates": "July 10, 1979 - Science writer Richard C. Hoagland first proposes theory that Europa's surface is a massive ice-covered ocean." Later, on the same page one finds a long quote from Dickinson's Toronto Star article, which would seem to be the source of this information. On an accompanying page EUROPA: Discovery, Hypotheses, and Exploration,
one finds the illustration portraying a Europan ice-covered ocean taken from Hoagland's website (from the page introducing The Europa Enigma discussed above). The illustration is identified as: "Hoagland's Proposed Model of Europa."
I also contacted the author of that website, but he never made the appropiate changes. [Those webpages are now
defunct, probably removed sometime in late 2001.]

One has to ask the question of whether Hoagland was simply oblivious to this seemingly widespead misunderstanding. I cannot believe that was the case. As I mentioned above, I first raised this issue in June, 1997 and continued to complain about it. Also, it is impossible for me to imagine that a complimentary reference to him in the major press - the above mentioned ABC News report- would not have been brought to his attention.

One rather disturbing case came to my attention in April, 1998 when
I contacted Lars-Jonas Angstrom to inquire about why Hoagland was given
the Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science. One of the two reasons
that Angstrom gave was Hoagland's "old hypothesis of water existing
on Europa." I could not help but wonder if Hoagland was aware that
this was one of the reasons why Angstrom gave him that Medal. Here
is an excerpt from Angstrom's reply to my inquiry:

"The Angstrom
Foundation was founded in order to preserve the premises of my ancestors
in the little town of Ange some 450 km north of Stockholm and to make it
available as a mini-conference center to researchers and scientists within
various fields of science. Of course, the idea was also to preserve the
memory of my family and to show that true science can originate also from
a financially poor background. The Foundation is registered to support
the fields of natural science, economy and education, and to act as publishers
of literature of interest. As the Foundation lacks any large financial
funds, the idea was born to use our medal and award it as an act of encouragment
for spearhead theories and hypotheses in order to encourage (young) scientists
in their work of research. The idea was to have different levels from high-school
and up. No definite achievements or breakthroughs should be required -
only a genuine interest and work in order to try various ways to find the
true track in the very complicated world that we live in, now that man
has been able to leave Earth. We think that encouragement at an early stage
of research might be very important. As for Hoagland, he was not
awarded the medal for his investigations in connection with Cydonia, but
rather for his hypothesis of the possibility of different laws of physics
in our Solar System once being outside the very special conditions that
prevail on Earth. For example, the physics in rotating gas masses and the
energy involved. Also, his old hypothesis of water existing on Europa was
of interest.

As for the medal
itself, it was originally struck by the Royal Mint for the Royal Society
of Science in memory of my great grandfather Anders Jonas Angstrom (1874).
The medal has been awarded some 65 times and seems to be highly appreciated.
It has mostly been awarded in connection with achievements related to spectral
analysis."

In another message that I received from him, Mr. Angstrom
writes:

"I do understand how you and a lot of other thinking
people feel about the whole matter and I am sorry that instead of doing
something good, I have unknowingly contributed to the opposite. I feel
that it is nothing wrong with having new and sometimes far-fetched ideas
- but you got to be humble about it. If we had not had people going ahead
with impossible ideas, we would not have had trains, aircrafts, microscopes,
pasteurization, ultrasonic sound generators, or rockets to the moon and
elsewhere. Contrary thinking is okay - but be humble about it. "

Most of the Angstrom Medals have been awarded to scientists
at Upssala University chosen by the science faculty of that university.
The reader can find more details about the Angstrom Foundation and the
history of the awarding of the Angstrom Medal as a prize here. One
also finds on that site some communications from Mr. Angstrom to its
author which give some insight into his present opinion about Hoagland
and also the unfortunate consequences of his decision to award an Angstrom
Medal to him. My correspondence with Mr. Angstrom continued for
a considerable time, but mostly concerned topics quite unrelated to
the Angstrom Foundation and to Hoagland.

As far as I know, Richard Hoagland has never responded to the substance of my criticism over this issue. He has not even corrected or modified
the misleading statement which is quoted above, taken from his website.
It still is there introducing his article The
Europa Enigma. However, in May, 1998, I succeeded in putting some
heat on Hoagland by challenging him to a debate concerning several issues. In my letter to Hoagland (which I also sent to Art Bell and some of his regular guests), I wrote concerning the Europa issue:

You have often stated that you were the first person to propose the
ideas that Europa might have an ocean under a crust of ice and that life might evolve in such an environment. My contention is that the actual history of those ideas does not support your claim of priority.

To my surprise, and without telling me in advance, Art Bell confronted him with my challenge on the air. That occurred on
May 26th, two weeks after I sent that letter. (I faxed Art a copy of that letter again on that day, knowing that Hoagland was scheduled to be a guest that night.) The primary issue was Hoagland's claim that certain numerical
relationships provide
strong evidence that various objects in the Cydonia
region of Mars are artificial. My stated contention was that "virtually all of this evidence is fallacious and should be discarded." Hoagland refused to debate me and was extremely insulting when he talked about me. He did allude
to Europa, and said that Terence Dickinson and Arthur C. Clarke gave him
credit for the idea, and that my challenge on that issue was political. That was all.

Later that year, in late September, 1998, Hoagland's assistant
Michael Bara did allude to
my criticism in his long posting Orwell and the Internet which appeared on the Enterprise Mission website. The reader should read what he writes, which is close to the end of the article. Especially at the very end, Bara brings shame to himself by juxtaposing comments about me and Squyres with
quotes and a photo of Hitler and Goebbels.

Earlier in Bara's posting, he does acknowledge
that Hoagland was not the first to propose the existence of an ocean on Europa, writing:

Building from earlier work [13] Hoagland wove together an elegant pattern of
fact and informed speculation to propose the mechanism by which Europa's
"global" ocean (then just a much discounted idea among planetary scientists)
could have harbored and nurtured life from the very dawn of the Solar System.

The reference [13] is the
1979 paper of Cassen, Peale, and Reynolds Is there liquid water on Europa? I remember reading Bara's acknowledgement and thinking that finally my criticism has had some result. But I asked myself if this was enough. It was clear to me that this brief, and rather begrudging, statement, would not correct the wide-spread myth
that existed. It seemed to me just a whisper in the corner that would have little impact. I felt that it was just an attempt to put the issue aside, and was not even close to being an adequate response.

It was roughly around that same time that I started to create my homepage.
I decided to write my article - "An Ocean on Europa? - History of an Idea" -
which
wasn't finished until February, 1999. After finishing that article and also an
essay about the D &M Pyramid (much briefer than the present version), I started to bring my homepage to the attention of a number of people who I knew were either supporters or critics of Hoagland. Sometime after that, I happened to
notice a posting on the website for the Jeff Rense Show which accused
Hoagland of taking false credit for discovering the "Abydos Glyphs."
(Someone had posted
a link to it on the BBS on the website for Art Bell's Show.) I impulsively
decided to send an e-mail message to Rense asking if he would consider providing a forum for my criticism of Hoagland concerning the Europa issue.
I included a link to my historical article and also to the fax that I sent to Art Bell in 1997, which I had already put on my website. He wrote back saying that he would be glad to do that. And then, all of a sudden, my e-mail message along with the fax appeared as a posting on his website: Richard Hoagland Charged With More
Plagiarism and Fraud. That was on March 5th, 1999. I added an
addendum on March 6th after someone contacted me asking about the statement that Hoagland made which had prompted my fax.

On March 6th, Richard Hoagland
had
a major heart attack. Art Bell informed his audience of Hoagland's condition on March 8th. Although the timing was remarkable, I felt that it was nothing but
a coincidence. In any case, I did not pursue the issue for quite a while after that.

Concerning Hoagland's accusation against Steven
Squyres, one does find the following letters on the website, including
a response from Squyres: Page
1, Page
2, Page
3. Squyres states simply and convincingly that in his lecture
and in the news interviews that he gave, he did not claim personal credit
for ideas about life on Europa. In July, 2000, I contacted Nick Flowers,
who wrote the news report on which Hoagland's accusation against Squyres
is based, and gave him the link to the press
release on the Enterprise Mission website. In his e-mail response, Dr. Flowers, who is a scientist himself, wrote:

"I was well aware of the potential sub-surface ocean idea when I interviewed
Steven in 96. I'd read Clarke's work and seen numerous articles with the
idea in, if he had claimed credit I would have realised that was incorrect -
but he didn't.

I reread the article as posted on that site...he [Squyres] merely supports/ advertises
the idea, sticking his own neck out for it and raising the potential of
hydrothermal vent supported life. Hoagland has no reason to be annoyed over
it...and I have no recollection of him contacting me. I'm away from my main
email store - which would confirm this."

This wasn't clear enough to me, and so I wrote back asking specifically
about the following statement in his article: "He speculates that biological
activity may instead be powered by geothermal heat at the centre of the planet - much like thermophillic, heat-loving bacteria and isolated
biological communities recently discovered near submarine volcanoes on Earth."
Flowers responded as follows:

"I can speculate too, but it doesn't mean I claim to be the first to do so,
and Steven did not do so with me. I've dealt with him a few times, in the
capacity of a journalist, and he has always thought carefully about what
he has said and caveated it appropriately - something I respect and
appreciate seeing as I have been interviewed many times about many topics."

In response to my question as to whether Squyres gave the impression that that
speculation was his own, original idea, Flowers wrote:

"I cannot of course remember everything he said, but the article does not
claim he said this, and I would have known that to be false - I would recall
that."

It was also clear from his message that he had been completely unaware of how his article had been used by Hoagland. I wrote back to him, telling him
that the accusation against Squyres was
also made on the extremely popular late-night radio show hosted
by Art Bell and that the show is nation-wide and has probably millions
of listeners. I expressed surprise that no one at all had contacted him
back in 1996. In response, he confirmed this, writing:

"I have scanned my email archive (it would have such an interesting
interaction still in it). The string "Hoagland" does not feature save for our
recent emails, and "Squyres" pops up only in Press Releases and my emails
to/from him. I have not been contacted by these irritating people."

In his letter, Squyres states that discussions of the possibility of an ocean under the icy crust of Europa took place immediately when the images from Voyager 2 first started to come in. He also states that Hoagland was present at the time and overheard these discussions. His account seems credible. As described in my article An Ocean on Europa?, a number of papers suggesting that possibility had appeared in the scientific literature since 1971. The theory was certainly familiar to NASA scientists. The paper by Cassen, Peale, and Reynolds Is there liquid water on Europa? concerning the effect of tidal heating was written just a month before, at the
end of June, 1979. (The published article appeared in a journal in
September of that year.) Those scientists had already achieved notoriety at NASA several months earlier for their dramatic prediction of substantial volcanism on Io just days before Voyager 1 sent back photos of that moon. Their prediction was confirmed within weeks. They did not have the same level of confidence for their ideas concerning Europa as they did for their prediction about Io, but nevertheless those ideas must have been the
subject of discussions even before Voyager 2 arrived at Europa.

The Voyager scientists who examined the photos of Europa
later published a summary of their findings (in Science , November,
1979) where they discuss the theories and evidence
concerning a Europan ocean in some detail. The discussion is rather
inconclusive, but nevertheless the idea is taken seriously.

A National Geographic article (January, 1980) about the Voyager mission gives some idea about what scientists were thinking at the time. Here are some quotes:

"Europa, however, was Voyager 2's star. The scientists were predicting that water-rich Europa could be heated by the same kind of tugging as Io - albeit much less so. 'We were hoping to see Old Faithful going off,' said geologist Hal Masursky. Voyager 2 saw no geysers - but its resolution was only good enough to detect mammoth ones."

"An Io-like tidal heating may indeed be keeping the crust of Europa plastic and the ocean beneath either liquid or soft ice. But no one can do more than guess at what mechanisms Europa uses to erase its craters."

Concerning the general view of NASA scientists towards the possibility of life on Europa, I have no documentation one way or the other, but I suspect that
most would have thought it somewhat premature to speculate seriously about that possibility. In his letter, Squyres states that such discussions also took
place when the Voyager 2 images started to come in. At least one scientist
did offer such speculations publicly, namely Benton Clark who does have a
close connection to NASA and made the topic part of his lecture at a large
conference at NASA's Ames Research Center - LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. Also,
Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro, both very noted scientists, discussed the
possibility of life in oceans on Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa in their
book LIFE BEYOND EARTH. (See Message 4 to Michael Bara.)

As for Hoagland overhearing conversations, only he himself could say what he learned from the discussions around JPL.

Most of the above account was posted on this website by August, 2000. In mid-September, a news report about recent discoveries concerning Europa prompted Michael Bara and Richard Hoagland
to post the following article on the Enterprise Mission
website: Europa Reveals More of Her
Secrets - Hoagland Confirmed Again.As the reader will see, the work of Cassen, Peale, and Reynolds is now referred to in this posting (with the mistaken date of 1977). Hoagland now seems to be sharing credit for the idea of an ocean on Europa with those scientists. Ideas of Duncan Lunan (and his associates at ASTRA), of Benton Clark, and of Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro concerning life in such an ocean are still not referred to
at all. The posting complains that there is an attempt to deny Richard Hoagland appropiate
credit for his ideas about Europa. There is no reference to misleading statements
that Hoagland has made in the past or to the fact that many
people have believed that
Hoagland was the first person to suggest the possibility that Europa might
have a liquid water ocean.

But there is a response to the accusation (by me)
that Hoagland did misrepresent the history of ideas about Europa. Hoagland and Bara respond to such a charge by
mentioning the fact that Hoagland does cite the ideas of Cassen, Peale, and Reynolds in
his 1980 article The Europa Enigma

. (For the convenience of the reader,
here are the pages in The Europa Enigma where Hoagland discusses the
ideas of those scientists concerning Io and Europa:
Page 26,
Page 28,
Page 29. Those ideas are contained in two papers published in 1979: Meltings of Io by Tidal Dissipation and Is There Liquid Water on Europa?.)

I do not
feel that this is an adequate response to my accusation. First of all,
my criticism of Hoagland over this issue has been solely based on his
behavior long after that article was written. No matter how clearly he may
have attributed certain ideas to others in his 1980 article, that does
not give him a license to make misleading statements elsewhere and at
other times.

Secondly, I question whether the citations on those pages in The Europa Enigma are actually clear enough. When I
first read the article back in 1997, I did feel that Hoagland was
sufficiently clear
in making attributions of certain ideas to Cassen, Peale and Reynolds.
It seemed
to me that an attentive reader would pick that up. However, my opinion
about this has changed since then. I was not a typical reader since
I already knew something about the history of ideas concerning Europa.
Most readers would know nothing about that history.
I suspect that such readers, perusing the article after reading the very misleading introductory page, would think that the idea that Europa might have a liquid water ocean is an original idea of Hoagland.
As I've already discussed,
numerous readers did get the wrong impression about the origin of that idea.
Above all, the example of Terence Dickinson stands out. One would certainly assume that he read
Hoagland's article attentively. It is possible, as I suggested earlier,
that Arthur C. Clarke also had the wrong impression.

Thirdly, the excuse that Hoagland cites Cassen, Peale and Reynolds in
his 1980 article strikes me as rather hypocritical. Hoagland accused Steven
Squyres of trying to steal credit from him for ideas about Europa back in
1996. This
accusation was revived in a more recent posting on the Enterprise
Mission website: NASA Slams the Door on Scientific Democracy where Hoagland and Bara refer to
Squyres as "best known to Enterprise readers for plagiarizing Hoagland's work on Europa a few years ago." But both of them are fully aware of
the fact that
the paper On the Habitability of Europa by Steven Squyres
(and three other scientists), published in 1983, also specifically cites Hoagland's 1980 article
(as well as Clarke's novel "2010: Odyssey Two") for speculations
concerning the possibility that life might evolve in an
ocean on Europa.

"It is, of course, not possible to make definite predictions as to
whether life actually exists, has existed, or in fact could exist on
Europa from the calculations presented here, although such scenarios have
been conjectured (e.g., Hoagland, 1980; Clarke, 1982)."

That posting Scientists
"Discover" Source of Europa's Dark Cracks -- 20 years After
Hoagland (also authored by Hoagland??) is misleading in itself
concerning one important point - the fracturing of the surface and the
mechanism which could bring material from the
ocean below onto the surface.
The Europa Enigma is also very misleading about this point. Readers
will get the false impression that it was an original idea of
Hoagland that tidal
forces on Europa's crust would lead to fracturing the surface, and
evaporation of the water from below, which would then precipitate onto
the surface around the cracks. However, that idea is not due to Hoagland. It
is stated precisely in that form as one of the conclusions in the paper Is there liquid water on Europa?
That paper backs up that conclusion with a mathematical analysis based on the
predicted thickness of the icy crust, the magnitude of the stress exerted by
Jupiter's gravitational force, and the tensile strength of ice at the known
surface temperature. It is unfortunate that Hoagland did not properly
attribute that idea to those scientists. As far as the idea that the
dark stains around the cracks
might be due to organic material coming up from below, along with the water,
how can one know if that idea is really original? In any case, it is just an
unsubstantiated remark. Brad Dalton, the scientist mentioned in the
posting linked above, did not see a good reason to make an
attribution to Hoagland about that, and I agree with his decision. It is
rare in scientific papers to give attributions to remarks that people make
unless those remarks are backed up by some substantial
evidence, which could be
theoretical, experimental, or observational. Hoagland's remark, original or
not, does not justify any attribution in my opinion. Let me add that the
actual mechanism that would be responsible for the reddish-brown
coloration of a large portion of Europa's surface would be somewhat different.
This coloration is in a region where scientists believe that the crust has
frequently melted through to the underlying ocean, creating large lakes of
exposed water which would then result in the kind of massive eruption that
Dalton refers to.

This whole affair is rather sad in a way. Hoagland was indeed
one of the first people to speculate about the
possibility that life might evolve on Europa. He helped to bring ideas about Europa to
the attention of the general public. His article inspired Arthur C. Clarke to make the
idea of life on Europa a theme in his novel "2010: Odyssey 2". But instead of being content with those
achievements, at some point Hoagland started to exaggerate the contribution that he made,
and he has lost the respect of many people as a result. This includes people whose opinion
Hoagland should value. In particular, Lars-Jonas Angstrom, who in 1993 decided to offer
Richard Hoagland the Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science, recently issued a statement
about the Angstrom Foundation and the
Angstrom Medal (The Angstrom Foundation AB).
In that statement, he writes:

"The Angstrom Foundation AB wants to support and promote excellence
in all of the natural sciences.

The Foundation is aware of the fact that through out history it
has happened that researchers and scientists have "borrowed" other
researchers and scientists ideas, theories, discoveries and
contributions pretending it to be their own discoveries and claiming
credit for themselves.

To do so knowingly -- without an immediate correction -- is far
from showing excellence in science and is, in our opinion, nothing
less than a disgrace. A person doing so is disgraceful and is also
bringing disgrace to a field of science in which he/she definitely
does not belong. The Angstrom Foundation AB would never knowingly
promote such an action."

Although Mr. Angstrom doesn't refer to Hoagland by
name, I believe that it is clear who he is thinking of in that
strongly-worded statement. After Mr. Angstrom informed me in 1998 that
Hoagland's "old hypothesis of water existing on Europa" was a factor
in his decision to give Hoagland the Angstrom Medal, I replied by
informing Mr. Angstrom that that hypothesis was not
due to Hoagland, and was, in fact, the subject of
a number of scientific papers throughout the 1970s and offered to send
him more details. He responded quickly, giving me his postal address, and so I then sent him a copy of my
letter (from June, 1997) summarizing the history of the idea as well
as a report on my "Telephone Number Experiment" which I thought
might interest him too. His next message to me began as follows:

Dear Mr Greenberg,

Thank you for the very interesting material you sent me by mail. I
like the way you give Hoagland credit for his work while you on the
other hand criticize him (with all rights) for what you believe he is doing
wrong. I wish you could have a debate with him. I do not think that
it is right to claim that you are first with a theory (not that it
matters if you are first, second or third as long as your theory is of
interest and contributes something) when history shows something else,
neither do I think it is right to refuse or ignore a debate in case
you will be debating the same thing. I also agree with you
that it hardly can be called science to build such far reaching theories on
such unreliable grounds as those you describe.

Mr. Angstrom is also referring to something that I had mentioned in
one of my initial e-mail messages to him - my intention to challenge Hoagland
to a debate. In some of his later messages, he continued to inquire
about the possibility of such a debate taking place, and of course I
informed him about my futile attempts to get that to happen. This is
also alluded to in his statement about the Angstrom Foundation (linked
above).

Unfortunately, the issue remains unresolved. It would have been so much better for everyone involved if Hoagland had been willing to be more forthright and fair after receiving my letter in June, 1997. It really is a question of fairness and Hoagland seems to be painting himself into a corner on the issue. The conflict has come up again because of an article that appeared in November, 2000 in The Skeptical Inquirer and an ill-considered rebuttal to that article by Hoagland's assistant Michael
Bara. I decided to send a long response directly to
Mr. Bara. Included in that response is a more detailed account of what
led me to dig into the Europa history before June, 1997 and what
happened afterwards. It is posted on the following page together with
any responses which I receive from Mr. Bara: Continuation. The reader will also find links to
future messages which will be posted.